John Rawls

John Rawls

John Bordley Rawls (; February 21, 1921 – November 24, 2002) was an American moral, legal and political philosopher in the liberal tradition. Rawls received both the Schock Prize for Logic and Philosophy and the National Humanities Medal in 1999, the latter presented by President Bill Clinton, in recognition of how Rawls's work "revived the disciplines of political and ethical philosophy with his argument that a society in which the most fortunate help the least fortunate is not only a moral society but a logical one".In 1990, Will Kymlicka wrote in his introduction to the field that "it is generally accepted that the recent rebirth of normative political philosophy began with the publication of John Rawls's A Theory of Justice in 1971". Rawls has often been described as one of the most influential political philosophers of the 20th century. Read more on Wikipedia

Since 2007, the English Wikipedia page of John Rawls has received more than 2,478,550 page views. His biography is available in 61 different languages on Wikipedia. John Rawls is the 138th most popular philosopher (down from 115th in 2019), the 192nd most popular biography from United States (down from 163rd in 2019) and the most popular American Philosopher.

John Rawls is most famous for his work in political philosophy, which he called "justice as fairness." Rawls argued that a society is just if it meets two conditions: (1) all citizens have the same basic liberties and opportunities, and (2) inequalities are to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged.